Starship Soars Past Internal Upheavals To Regain Chart Success

The manager refers to the new record as the group's first album. The founder, who left last year amid creative and legal unrest, says the band is virtually unrecognizable from its original form.

Even lead singer Mickey Thomas describes it as ''a new band that happens to have a long past.''

It's been a year of change, regrouping and streamlining for Starship, the San Francisco-based band formerly known as Jefferson Starship. It all centered around the loss of guitarist Paul Kantner, who founded the group as Jefferson Airplane in 1966.

But the band's loss has become its own gain. A cleaner, modernized sound has Starship's hit-making engines revved up again: ''We Built This City'' is currently Billboard's No. 1 single, and the album, Knee Deep in the Hoopla, is in the top 20, the best showing the group has made so far this decade.

''Things have really been opened up a lot lately,'' Thomas, 35, said from his hotel room in Tulsa, Okla. ''A lot of restraints have been lifted from us. We've had a chance to go outside the band and look for other songs from outside writers for the first time ever.

''Obviously, it's paid off,'' he added. ''I'm just so excited about the band and the single and the album and our tour that I don't even think about what happened with Paul very much anymore.''

What happened with Kantner was the worst political upheaval in the group's long history. The current Starship lineup -- Thomas, singer Grace Slick, guitarist Craig Chaquico, bassist Pete Sears and drummer Don Baldwin -- accused Kantner of being dictatorial and stagnant.

''He demanded a certain amount of space for his songs on each album, which was usually three or four,'' explained Thomas, who joined Starship in 1978 after a stint with Elvin Bishop.

''That got into this whole political thing where Craig and Pete said, 'If Paul gets that much space, we want it, too.' Grace and I found ourselves trying to mold ourselves into that formula, whether we liked it or not. We were just making the same album over and over again.''

The group finally drew a hard line with Kantner, taking many of his songs out of the concert repertoire and threatening to not use any of them on the next album. He eventually left -- and now is starting a group with former Jefferson Airplane members Marty Balin and Jack Casady.

While there's still a bit of old material in the shows to please old fans -- hits like ''Jane,'' ''Find Your Way Back'' and the Airplane's ''Somebody to Love'' -- Thomas admitted that ''some of them are going to be disappointed with this band.

''One of the things we really set out to achieve with this album was to establish a new audience,'' he explained. ''You get that feeling from the audiences now that they're seeing you for the first time. It makes it exciting.

''Naturally, it creates some animosity with the old fans, but you can't please everybody. They have to bear with us and understand and try to see it from our point of view.''